More than 15 members of the SAP Advisory Council For Mining have met in Cape Town, South Africa to discuss the processes and technologies that will drive the digital mine of the future.
The group brings CIOs of key mining organisations together annually to discuss developments in the industry, including how digital technologies such as the Internet of Things, cloud, big data, enterprise mobility, autonomy, geo-sensing, analytics and 3D printing can support efficient operations and sustainable growth. CIOs will also share examples of digital transformation projects that use SAP software and services.
Global gold producer AngloGold Ashanti has used SAP SuccessFactors Learning and Recruiting Management solutions to manage the demands of operations of 20 gold mining operations across 10 countries.
“In a global enterprise such as ours, the ability to standardise the employee lifecycle across various geographies is imperative,” said Pieter du Toit Ooshuizen, vice president, IM planning and governance, AngloGold Ashanti. “SAP SuccessFactors solutions enable us to not only manage compliance, ethics and process training in various locations and languages but also internationally to expedite the process of recruiting talent. In addition to the current benefits we are seeing, we will also be utilising SAP SuccessFactors solutions to optimise and deploy other existing functionality over the next four years.”
Cameco Corp, one of the world’s largest uranium producer, uses the SAP Manufacturing Integration and Intelligence application to integrate its ERP data and its control systems data.
“SAP solutions for the IoT are enabling us to solve some big challenges in the area of production loss management at Cameco,” said Mark Leach, vice president, business technology services, Cameco. “Being able to develop human machine interfaces, transfer data more quickly to data historians and do more sophisticated reporting will help us to uncover process inefficiencies and help reduce the cost and risk of operations.”
Australia’s PanAust Limited, a cooper and gold producer with operations in Laos and predevelopment opportunities in Laos, Papua New Guinea, and Chile, has also shared its experience with SAP Business Suite powered by HANA, as well as the Fiori user experience, to ready the company to fast-track the development of new mining projects.
The benefits it has achieved include the reduction in shared services and corporate costs 5 per cent year over year, the elimination of 34 expatriate positions in maintenance, supply and management, and user uptake of SAP Fiori apps in purchasing and human resources with no training.
“SAP Business Suite powered by SAP HANA gives PanAust a robust and industry-leading platform that is being leveraged to onboard new businesses seamlessly and achieve substantial cost savings across all functional areas,” said Darren Hadfield, group information systems manager, PanAust. “SAP Fiori increased user acceptance and satisfaction, reduced training costs and provides a powerful reporting and analytics platform.”
